Current mood:	exhausted
Entry tags:	hollywood, movie biz, screenwriting craft

Comedy Script -- Final Draft Done!
I worked about 25 hours on this project in the last three days, was just down at Kinko's/FedX making my copies tonight at 8pm... Worked on it until 2 am last night. Started again at 1pm today. And I've achieved a completed and fairly polished draft of CAN'T SAY NO, my first (true) comedy script! W00t!

I say first true comedy script because I've tried to write comedy before and the script turns out only funny some of the time. Humorous bits for tension relief. A True comedy script is OMG so hard! A joke or two on every page! There is something humorous on every page, and on many pages there are 2-3 jokes on this one. It reads sort of like 30ROCK crossed with BIG BANG THEORY. Here's the blah-blah.

CAN'T SAY NO is a family comedy about a geeky, ignored engineer who invents creativity glasses to help his overworked team of product developers become more productive. Their job at a combo Ronco-type product company and Home Shopping Network is driving them all crazy since the new Assoc Producer cut their project schedules by half. But turns out the glasses have a side effect: they make the wearer so charismatic people hang on their every word and give them anything they ask for.

The immediate deadline was Austin Film Festival -- tomorrow is the final, final day to submit to their contest. I also am taking this to the Hawaii Writers Conference and working on it (or on HEAVEN & NELL? I'm still puzzling that) at the retreat. But that's not until August. Here are the reputable (and some not-so-much but I'm trying it out) contests I'll be submitting to. I missed March deadlines for some I'd planned on; catch that in 2010 I guess.

• Austin Film Festival - due 8 June - √
  
• SlamDance - due 15 June, but they take electronic submissions, top prize $5,000 - √
  
• Final Draft Big Break Screenplay Contest - due 15 June, take electronic submissions, over $30K in prizes - √
  
• ScriptShark Insider Contest - due 30 June, take electronic submissions
  
• First Glance - due 12 July, take electronic submissions - √
  
• Cynosure - due 27 June, has to have a female or minority protagonist (my main character is a geeky white guy, but his antagonist who becomes his romantic partner is a Korean-American woman) - √
  
• Writers on the Storm - due 27 July, take electronic submissions - $10K grand prize - √
  
• Zoetrope All Story - due 8 September - prize is consideration by Francis Ford Coppola

Who else? I've posted lists of reasonable contests a couple of times; I'll check to make sure I haven't left someone off. Ah, found them: Scriptapalooza, Scr(i)pt Magazine, Nicholl Fellowship, Writers Network.